Insult to the Liver

In medicine, if there is a blow or other injury to the liver, physicians will often say that the patient suffered an insult to the liver. I am sure you know where I am going with this. Who can resist imagining insults to the liver? Here are a few:

• Your liver is ugly
• Your mother's liver is ugly
• Your liver can't hold a candle to mine
• Your liver is stupid
• Your liver can't tell the difference between hepatitis A and hepatitis B
• You have a puny liver
• Your liver is so small, it won't show up on an MRI
• Your liver is so tiny it looks like a kidney

Feel free to add your liver insults.

Having Hepatitis

Recently I visited a dear friend who has cancer and is in hospice. Her days are numbered, as the saying goes, although Woody Allen asked, "why aren't they lettered instead of numbered?" Anyway, my friend told me that the best cancer card she received was this: On the cover it said, "Cancer sucks" On the inside it read, "But it's better than being married to John Edwards."

Politics aside, what I like about the message is the concept that even with a life-threatening disease, there are worse things. So, what is worse than having hepatitis? Here are a few:
Being stuck on a bus in traffic with teenagers singing "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall."
Having Mike Tyson bite of my ear
A world without Internet and clumping cat litter
Finding out that chocolate is actually bad for you

Do you have any to add?

Liver Enhancement

I was musing over my March 25th blog, “The Heart of the Matter,” where I substituted the word liver for the word heart. I did not exhaust this subject, as there are many more expressions using the word heart. Before revisiting this, I wondered if there were liver expressions other than “What do you think, this is, chopped liver?” and “That takes gall.” So, I put the words liver and expressions in Google’s search field and got 995,000 hits. Most of them were biomedically-related.  If you want to bore yourself to cirrhosis, read about genetic expression of the liver. The first article about liver enhancers caught my eye. Wow, I thought about enhancing various body parts, but never my liver. Upon closer inspection, I read the actual title: Two Hepatic Enhancers, HCR.1 and HCR.2, Coordinate the Liver Expression of the Entire Human Apolipoprotein E/C-I/C-IV/C-II Gene Cluster. I don’t think I’m ready for that kind of enhancement just yet.

Happy April Fool's Day

April Fool’s Day is my favorite day of the year. I don’t know why it isn’t a national holiday. Can you imagine if we all had a day off to laugh and play? My goodness, that has to be a prescription for good health. My liver would be so happy it would be doing the Snoopy dance.

Have you told a joke to your liver today?